The EepyBird Approach

What fascinates us is how everyday objects can do extraordinary things. Whether it’s Diet Coke & Mentos or sticky notes, it’s all stuff you can find at the corner store. We just spend long, long hours experimenting, discovering new and surprising things they can do. And after coming up with a hundred bad ideas, we find the one thing that’s really wonderful.

We spent almost six months developing all the different Diet Coke & Mentos effects: cutting holes in bottles, tying them to strings, finding different ways to drop the Mentos into the bottles. We’ve been working for over a year on sticky notes, in between all our travels.

One of our first thoughts was these zigzag pads of sticky notes for pop-up dispensers should be able to flow like a Slinky. But if you do it the way you’d think would work, by trying to tip it straight forward, it gets stuck and doesn’t flow. After three days of experimenting with all kinds of ideas with sticky notes, we finally had that moment of discovery: turn it sideways! By rotating it 90 degrees, now when you tip it, it spreads like an accordion and flows like a waterfall—perfect!

It then took several months to learn all the variables: How far can they fall? How many can you put together? Can they walk down steps? The discoveries can take so long to find and yet seem so obvious when you find them. For example, simply sticking one end of a pad to the other led us to create the pinwheels, one of our favorite effects. It took ages to think of it, but it’s so simple and elegant.

EepyBird explores creativity, and the ways ordinary objects can do extraordinary things. Their first video, The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments, took the idea of dropping Mentos into soda and turned it into one of the best known viral videos of all time. Their viral videos have earned two Emmy nominations, won four Webby Awards, landed them on Vh1's list of greatest Internet superstars, and were voted GoViral's Online Game Changer of the Decade. Altogether, EepyBird's videos have now been seen over 150 million times. In addition to creating viral marketing campaigns for brands like Coca-Cola, OfficeMax, and ABC Family, Grobe and Voltz also give presentations at corporate events on viral video, creativity, and innovation. They have been featured on The Late Show with David Letterman, The Today Show, Ellen, and Mythbusters. EepyBird has performed live in London, Paris, Las Vegas, and Istanbul. They have appeared in videos for Blue Man Group, Barenaked Ladies, and Weezer (the Grammy-winning Pork & Beans). And they have even set several Guinness world records. Most of all, EepyBird spends countless hours exploring how everyday objects can do extraordinary things - and how that can then be turned into successful viral videos.